Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Shape of Water
2017 · Guillermo del Toro · The Shape of Water on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count how rarely red appears, and who is wearing it. (light)
Laustsen soaks walls, uniforms and water in teal and green until the color stops describing objects. Red is rationed: Elisa's shoes, a slice of pie. Each appearance lands like a spoken line.
Payoff: Color does the talking for a woman who cannot talk, which is what melodrama has always used it for. In the reading: affective color. The green is what the reading calls affective color: a color that soaks up the whole scene's feeling instead of describing things in it.
Watch the camera drift sideways and crane gently in dry rooms. (camera)
Del Toro and Laustsen photograph corridors, apartments and the lab with the same slow floating movement they use for water. Rain streaks windows; glass doubles faces. The air seems to have weight.
Payoff: The whole city feels submerged before anyone gets in a tank, so the creature's element is already everywhere. In the reading: reume (liquid perception-image). This is the reading's reume: perception that flows rather than aims, belonging to no one in particular.
Watch Sally Hawkins's face in the seconds before she signs anything. (performance)
Hawkins builds Elisa from small accumulating movements, not held expressions. Pressure gathers in the eyes and mouth and hands until it has to go somewhere. She is hungry, not patient.
Payoff: With no dialogue, the face becomes the place the film stores everything the character wants. In the reading: icon of power (potisign). The reading calls this the potisign: a face where feeling builds toward a threshold instead of simply expressing one mood.
Track the morning routine: timer, bath, boiled eggs, bus. (structure)
Wolinsky sets the sequence as patterned montage early, then repeats it with changes. The order shifts, a step drops, a new gesture appears once the creature is in her life.
Payoff: You measure how far Elisa has traveled by what her body does each morning, not by anyone telling you.
Listen for dripping, sloshing, machine hum and the cinema below. (sound)
Because Elisa never speaks, del Toro fills the track with water, records, radio and Desplat's waltzing accordion score. The creature answers in clicks and trills. Silence gets a lot of room.
Payoff: A vocabulary of sounds and signs replaces dialogue, and you learn to read it as fluently as speech.
Once you have seen it
Watch Michael Shannon's body: the fingers, the posture, the sweat. (performance)
Strickland is written as a one-way descent. Sequeira dresses him in sickly greens and golds; Shannon lets control curdle into desperation. His decay is physical and never reverses.
Payoff: The enforcer of cleanliness rots while the caged creature heals, flipping who counts as grotesque.
Look at the black-and-white musical number: who is moving whom. (staging)
Elisa stops driving the scene. The set, the orchestra and the dance take her over, and she gets a voice in exactly the sequence where she has stopped acting and the film dreams for her.
Payoff: Her one moment of speech is borrowed from a genre, not won in the story, which is why it can only be a fantasy.
Listen to Giles narrating at the start, then again at the close. (sound)
Richard Jenkins tells the story as a legend of the princess without a voice. On a second pass you notice the unemployed artist is inventing the record for five people 1962 would never let narrate anything.
Payoff: Story-telling is the film's politics: people with no place in the official account write themselves one.
Count the stairwells, doorways, tubs and tanks Elisa passes through. (staging)
Austerberry's design keeps splitting the world into the warm curved wood above the Orpheum and the cold tile cathedral of the lab. Every important move is a crossing between them.
Payoff: The architecture sorts people into worlds, so escape has to be staged as passage rather than argument.
Carry this in: A woman who cannot speak is given color, water, camera drift and a score to say everything for her.